In a lull above St Privat d'Allier, the furze came alive with a mass of sudden flutterings. I stood, breathless, and within three feet of me the air was alive with the liquorice stripes of pied wagtails and the centurion's plumes of goldfinches, all bustling in this city of aerial inhabitants, like a cloud of wings. It was a vision of angels; all activity, a seethe of wings.
Later, five notes, a major third; third, tonic, third, tonic, third; and further bursts of three, tow, five notes, but always on this same pattern; third, tonic, third. The bird-music was almost mathematical in its precision, but impenetrable, inscrutable.
The country became more broken as I went on. At Rochegude a cylindrical, broken tower stands above its smaller, simple chapel, on a magnificent spur (yet when I looked back from Montaure I saw the castle lower than the surrounding country); a spur on the edge of the plateau, where suddenly the land falls away to the gorge of the Allier. A tapered cylinder with broken force, below which the path winds down between pines, lush (not stingy with spiky leaves as in the north) and each needle filled with softness and juice, and it winds down between huge boulders, all the huger in this narrow landscape of tree and rock. Rock springs up beneath my feet through the soft debris, and where I am not walking on stone I am walking on a soft carpet of browned pine needles and tiny pine cones which crush under my feet, or scud away at a kick.
I found an excellent rock there among the pine trees, or somewhere around the place - betwen, I think, Le Venet and Rognac - it might have been Montaure and Roziers; mossy, but not moist, with two great hollows in its rounded head; I lay down with my feet over one end and my head in one of the hollows, and moulded to its form felt almost as if it had been moulded to mine. I lay there a half hour's space and stared up at the sky, eggblue and hatched by small streamers of white, deep as the heart or a still pool.
Why do the wsipy clouds pass so fast? and the blocks of grey in the distance so slowly? How far are the clouds? They seemed very close sometimes; and then, in a few seconds, infinitely far.
Like the birds, the clouds have their own living and moving and being, a sphere I could never know or hope to learn; a world of non-human meanings, contingent with ours, but for ever apart. There is a fascination in coming so close to this other world; as there is in coming so close to the past, and seeming to understand it, and yet for all my sociological or political knowledge or the art-history which explains the sight I see, nothing can explain the vision of the past; it is impossible to know the past, which is always a closed world and which we can only appreciate at a remove.
And so on down to Monistrol, awful place; blocky houses, pylons, an electricity factory, a railway line, and the terrifying slack cables strung a hundred yards above the gorge, half a mile from side to side and swaying perilously in the high winds at that height. I have arrived at a little outpost of the Satanic mills. Imprisoned in the bottom of the gorge I find the landscape chaotic and my only orientation now is the broken stump of Rochegude, unless in the distance I can catch sight of the conical summit of La Visseyre, or such it seems to be from the map; but there are other conical peaks, not aharply conical but flat as if they have spread like sagging middle-aged breasts; or maybe it is the same peak from a different angle. There are too many gorges, or branches of the same gorge, and there is no plan to it all; but the gorge is closing on Monistrol, and the town is never out of shadow. Its waters are deathly cold.
Soon leaving on a hard road and steep ascent, between massive Symplegades of rock on each side constricting the path; and then off, up steps, clasping the rickety handrail, past a troglodytic chapel to Escluzels of the delightful name., which has a square which is not pretty, but reassuring in its rectilinearity after the chaotic landscape, the zigzags and crisscrosses of the gorge, and reassuring in a region where most of the villages now seem nothing but scratchy scatterings of houses. For Auvergne, it is almost urban; and I remember a red flower, startling in its assertion against the season and the clime. I filled my flask at the founatin, but the water tasted as tinny and bitter as the Gevaudan.
From here to the final descent to Saugues the route lay on a high and windy plateau, to the south the darkness of the Allier ravines, to the north the arid lights of the highlands. Mountains had encircled me the day before, but already the landscape had changed; the plateau was higher than the mountains, as high as the wind. The gnarled and chilblained hands of pollarded trees reach out, but grasp nothing.
Then finally the descent to Saugues; again going down to bed, down from the strenuous heights to the ease of the valley or the plain. But this was different from my climb down to Saint-Privat; that had been like entering a cave, down a narrow ravine filled with rushing water, the backs of my legs aching with the effort of not tumbling, sliding on the wet leaves; and this was a gentle cantering slope, a change of gear from nervous exhaltation to the golden openness of the plain, lying content and open before me.
Saugues never quite lived up to the approach, though the Tour des Anglais is a massive enough monument, and though I had a floodlit view of it from my room that night. Saugues is a town of character, but not charm; it is bare and open, a little cautious and guarded perhaps, and one can imagine easily the town facing the enemy in the middle ages, the plain scoured by the waves of war rushing across, back, across through the years, inconclusively.